African rock art depicting a mythical tufted creature may reflect the appearance of fossilized real-life relatives of ancient mammals called dicynodonts.
Abundant fossils exposed in South Africa’s Karoo Basin include dicynodont skulls with tusks that bend down and back, like those of the long-bodied animal depicted in roughly 200-year-old rock art by the region’s San hunter-gatherers, paleontologist Julien Benoit. . This painting appears among images painted on a rock-sheltered wall called the Horned Serpent panel, which includes a scene of ethnic warfare known to have occurred as far back as 1821, Benoit reports Sept. 18 in PLOS ONE.
The San people painted the rock art panel between 1821 and 1835, he estimates.
“The pack animal painting may represent a rain animal, a fantastical creature associated with rain-making San folklore,” says Benoit, of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
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As cave art paint has faded, so has the mythical creature painted on a rock shelter wall in South Africa. J. Benoit/PLOS ONE 2024 -
This black-and-white drawing reconstructs what a tufted dicynodont might have looked like when it roamed the Earth more than 200 million years ago. Marlene Hill Donnelly
San myths describe large animals that once inhabited southern Africa before they became extinct. If the dicynodont fossils influenced the painters of the tufted rock art, then this portrayal preceded the first scientific description of dicynodonts in 1845.
Dicynodonts generally lived from about 270 million to nearly 200 million years ago. Researchers have found San stone tools in several erosional outcrops containing dicynodont fossils. These places lie within 100 kilometers of the Horned Serpent panel.
Little is known about the extent to which indigenous Africans collected animal fossils and incorporated them into spiritual beliefs and rock art (SN: 10/5/96).
In Lesotho’s Mokhali Cave, located near preserved dinosaur tracks and fossils, San rock art includes an outline of a dinosaur track and three dinosaur silhouettes. Astute interpreters of footprints, the San people noticed that these creatures left no handprints or tail drag marks (SN: 6/11/15). So the dinosaur silhouettes lacked wings and had short tails, Benoit says.
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